Therapeutic Stretching
Doing daily stretches can literally save your neck and back. Children are like wiggly worms, stretching and moving all the time. Cats stretch after a nap. Kids and cats don’t have back and neck problems. They aren’t in pain because they are always stretching. The single most important thing you can do for yourself is to stretch! You can actually rejuvenate your body and look and feel years younger by doing a few stretches every day. Warm-up stretching is important to help prevent muscle strain or tears that can occur from sudden over-lengthening of the muscle-tendon unit.
Post workout stretching reduces muscular tension and helps prevent muscle soreness and fatigue.
Why flexibility? Flexibility is the common synonym for joint range of motion and is a major consideration in physical fitness, comfortable posture and physical medicine. Range of motion components include joints, ligaments, muscles, tendon, fascia, and connective tissue. Flexibility is related to body type, sex, age, bone, and joint structure, medical history, and other factors beyond an individuals control. Primary obstacles to flexibility are the musculature and fascia surrounding a specific joint. If the muscles, tendons, and connective tissue surrounding a joint are encouraged to elongate on a regular basis, normal joint range of motion will be retained.
The Active Isolated Stretches (AIS) I utilize in my stretch training, were developed by Aaron Mattes, a Kinesiologist with over 100,000 hours in instruction, rehabilitation, athletic training, adaptive physical education, sports medicine and prevention programs.
How does it work? AIS is a results oriented therapy that successfully deals with flexibility, injury prevention and rehabilitation, postural alignment – as well as boosting sports performance. This form of stretching helps to unwind tight body structures at the deepest fascial planes and realigns the skeletal system, improving the range of motion at the joint level.
Pain relief is rapid and flexibility results in less long-term wear and tear from postural asymmetry. Through reciprocal innervation of muscles that are actively contracted, the antagonist muscles will be relaxed and can be safely stretched so as to increase joint and muscle mobility. The AIS two second stretch technique repeatedly pumps oxygenated blood into muscle tissues without triggering the protective stretch reflex that activates after about three seconds. Due to the fundamental principles of this technique it is quite gentle, making it suitable for just about anyone.
Therapeutic Stretching for Rehabilitation provides an important adjunct toward recovery during the rehabilitation process and after, when the client is pronounced “almost back to normal”. Massage and stretching can be used in rehabilitation to assist in recovery of an acute problem or to keep a chronic problem from becoming acute. Appropriate massage and stretching helps a person recover faster and with less discomfort. The combination of a warm-up massage, followed by therapeutic stretches, can prevent muscle stiffness, trigger points, encourage pliable scar tissue, and aid in the reduction of swelling and bruising. It helps prevent joint sprains, strains or tears including preventing re-injury to previous muscle and joint trauma. Therapeutic stretching relieves the muscle-joint stiffness associated with the aging process and improves flexibility.